Hyperbole to the masses

Lies and exaggeration are a tool of the faux-populist right

North Carolina Rep. Madison Cawthorn created quite a stir late last month when he claimed he had been invited to orgies with fellow lawmakers, and that he’d seen them do “a key bump of cocaine” in front of him. Cawthorn made the comments on a rightwing podcast after being asked how close Netflix’s House of Cards was to reality.

House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy chastised Cawthorn privately, and — in a rare move — rebuked him publicly as well. The working theory is that while McCarthy is basically fine to let the farthest-right members of his caucus lie about Rep. Ilhan Omar and attend white nationalist conferences, a member implicating the whole kit and caboodle in coke-fueled orgies is a bridge too far.

McCarthy said Cawthorn walked back his comments in their meeting, claiming that he’d in fact seen a staffer a hundred yards away in a parking garage who might have been doing drugs. Cawthorn also reportedly said he “didn’t know what cocaine is,” which strikes me as a likely over-correction. For his part, Cawthorn issued a statement blaming the media and the left for his comments.

In other news from the QAnon wing of the Republican party, Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that any Senator voting to confirm Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was “pro-pedophile just like she is.” Greene repeated the accusation on Real America’s Voice Prime Time, saying Democrats are the “party of pedophiles.”

There’s obviously no point in fact checking Cawthorn’s or Greene’s remarks. To the extent that they’re made in earnest, they’re preposterous. To the extent that they’re a performance, they’re meant to trigger the libs (in MTG’s case) or strike an anti-establishment pose (in Cawthorn’s). Both sets of remarks are outgrowths of the Pizzagate conspiracy and QAnon, and, as Melissa Gira Grant has argued, the logical conclusion of decades of misinformation about sex trafficking.

There’s an additional aspect to this kind of register of far right rhetoric, which is that hyperbole can function as a form of mass politics. It’s common to posture as a Washington outsider. Cawthorn’s orgy remarks recast DC not only as a swamp of corruption, but a hotbed of sexual deviancy. By contrast, he becomes a man of the people, and a symbol of traditional virtue. In Greene’s case, she creates a world where an entire political party — presumably including both electeds and their constituencies — are a threat to every child, specifically your child. The confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice then becomes a battle between Manichean forces of good and evil, a battle that conscripts you (the Republican voter) whether you like it or not.

Donald Trump is the reigning champ of hyperbole, a man who elevated lying and exaggerating to a spectacle not seen in modern politics, at least at the presidential level. Never has a person done so much with the use of so few superlatives. Of Trump’s many lies, one of his favorites was his oft-repeated warning — deployed during both impeachments and subsequent investigations — “if they can do this to me, they can do it to anyone.” Any attempt to hold Trump accountable wasn’t simply an attack on Trump, it foreshadowed what they could do to you.

There’s a lot of discussion about how the crypto-fascist right has adopted faux-populist policies around trade or unspecified social safety net programs. There’s less of a recognition about how hyperbole can serve to create a mass politics by expanding the pool of potential victims of liberalism to include every would-be Republican voter. Slippery slope arguments are crucial to this effort. It’s not masks per se that Republicans object to, conservatives would say, it was that mask mandates were the first step down an inevitable road to tyranny. With enough exaggeration, anybody can be a future target of the liberal establishment cabal.

This type of manufacturing of a mass politics is necessary because, rhetoric aside, Republicans don’t have policies that serve to create natural mass constituencies for the most part. Republicans at the federal level are good at enacting tax cuts and nearly repealing the ACA, but not much else. Republicans at the state level are effective at making it impossible to get an abortion or receive healthcare if you’re a trans person. One way to transform these bigoted policies into something resembling a mass politics is by claiming that gender affirming healthcare is your business, because its an attack on your way of life. Anti-marriage equality rhetoric served the same function.

Now, obviously, Cawthorn and Greene’s remarks likely will not actually create large voting blocks for conservatives. In some cases, that kind of rhetoric is counterproductive because it’s so outlandish. But rather than just see their comments — or even QAnon phenomenon — as unhinged ravings, we should understand them as attempts to broaden a constituency by expanding the number of people who can imagine themselves being victimized by the villains the far right have identified. They are another arrow in the faux-populist right’s quiver, and need to be countered by a mass left politics, not simply dismissed as self-defeating lunacy.